Black Voters Matter's Albright agreed that specifics like these needed to be laid out.
"If you're just telling people to be a poll worker, but you are not laying out what that process is, then it's not going to happen. It's really that simple," he said. "You can tell people to be a poll worker. You can post a link that makes it easier for them to be a poll worker. You can post a link and give a somewhat detailed description of what this is really going to require of you."
Despite the constructive criticism, Sancho said the effort was achievable, especially in urban counties with large non-white populations that have seen some of the biggest poll closures in pandemic primaries. Leading examples include Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which went from 182 to five polling places in its April primary. Or Philadelphia, which closed 77 percent of its polls -- 600 locations. Or Las Vegas, which had only three in-person sites.
"Most of the urban supervisors have the training modules to be poll workers on the internet," Sancho said. "In Leon County, we do. If you're a first-time worker, they like to bring you into a training room. But after that, everything can be done online. You can review daily your tasks. And again, the people who are most likely to be able to use the internet on a regular basis are this target audience [younger people]. It's the older ones who have difficulty going on the internet to do the reviews."
"Training can be accomplished in a way that it couldn't have been 20 years ago if this pandemic had hit back then," he said. "They didn't have information on the internet. There was nowhere to go to remotely access it. It exists today."
Sancho reiterated that Trump's and the Republican Party's game plan for November appears to be attacking vote by mail now, while not discussing or planning to accommodate in-person voting -- to sow Election Day chaos that would be used as pretext to file suits so that federal courts, or even the Supreme Court, would end up deciding winners. The GOP's operatives likely won't be as explicit as Trump, but instead cite more mundane reasons to create those conditions.
"A lot of what is happening is the poll worker shortage is becoming part of the rationale for polling place closures, particularly in communities of color," said Palfrey. "Even when it happens for reasons that are not nefarious, it has the effect of making it harder for folks to vote, and often the people it affects the most are historically disenfranchised groups."
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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